Living with Drama

I’ve got a friend who, not too long ago, experienced some difficult times with his family. Addiction. Co-dependency. A nightmare of family recriminations. For a couple of months, it seemed, he was on the phone every day with his family rehearsing some new sordid development.

He and I went out to breakfast one day, and I asked him how he was doing. He said that this family crisis seemed to consume him, and that he didn’t have any energy for anything else. Always some new wrinkle, some new situation requiring that he devote more time and energy.

“It’s like living in a soap opera. And the weird thing is, I feel almost like I’m addicted to it.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“At first it seemed interesting being involved in something important. I liked the phone calls and the meetings, thinking I was helping to make the situation better. Hours every day. But then I realized that I needed the adrenaline rush I got when some new twist appeared, and we were all on the phone about it. Now, it just feels like we talk endlessly and nothing really gets fixed. And I’m beginning to wonder if I’m hooked on the drama.”

“So why don’t you quit doing it?” I wondered.

“It’s not that easy. I want to quit, but we really are talking about some important things. On the other hand, whatever we’re doing isn’t really changing anything; it’s just making me constantly stressed out and preventing me from doing other things I need to do. I don’t know.”

Have you ever been around somebody who’s gotten hooked on drama? Everything in their lives revolves around “the thing.” They endlessly run conversations and scenarios in their head, like the Joint Chiefs of Staff war gaming the invasion at Normandy. There’s intrigue and subplots, betrayals and instances of sacrifice, great acts of courage and petty retributions.

I’ve been a part of congregations like that. Congregations get hooked on drama. Phone line marathons. Postmortems on the board meeting in the parking lot. Strategy sessions seated around conference tables, furiously poring over copies of the by-laws, now complete with marginalia and a cross-referencing apparatus.

But the irony is that doing anything creative (or even constructive) is almost impossible once the drama takes hold. Reactivity reigns. You spend more time rehearsing what you “should have said” at the meeting than imagining what kind of action could allow you to realize a faithful vision of the future.

“So, how do we stop it?”

It would be easy for me to be glib, coming off like I have all the answers about how to disrupt the drama enough to get purchase on a healthier way of being. The truth of the matter is I don’t have any magic elixir I can dispense.

But let me get back to that in a minute.

If You Were Successful Would You Know It?

I was driving the other day, and this phrase popped into my head: If your congregation were ever successful, would you recognize it?

That’s a lot to unpack, right? Most of which has to do with how you define “success.” That’s problematic, as I’ve argued before, since congregations tend to have standards of success that are largely impossible to achieve, having to do with a variety of complex factors mostly out of any congregation’s control. Because of the culture we live in, we have a pretty good idea of what “successful” congregations are supposed to look like. They’re the one’s getting all the attention, the one’s reporters turn to to get a comment on breaking news, the one’s highlighted in denominational P.R. materials.

I’m increasingly convinced, however, that success has more than just one face—past which we all too quickly walk. There are successful congregations—congregations that are living faithfully their calling to embody the reign of God—which, because they don’t look that great according to the ways we’ve been taught to keep score, are always in jeopardy of despair—always in danger of succumbing to the temptation of drama.

These churches limp along on budgets that rarely seem to cover all the costs. They don’t have huge numbers of transfers. They can no longer support a graded Sunday School program. By all popular ecclesiastical accounting measures, they’re failures.

And it would be one thing if they failed courageously, but for the most part their failures are pedestrian, unexceptional, ho-hum.

Decline. Attrition. Death. Not with a bang but a whimper.

But what if there were some congregations, congregations that had no business calling themselves successful, that were actually doing something huge, enormous, earth-shattering? Because of the ways we’ve trained ourselves to think about success, would these churches even know they were setting the world on fire—and if not the world, then at least the worlds they occupy?

“So, where are you going with this?”

Let me try to weave two separate strands together.

The Tsunamis of Drama that Keep Us Preoccupied with Our Inadequacies

Congregations, like the enablers addicts require to feed their addictions, often get caught up in the self-destructive cycle of drama. They move from one catastrophe to another, always convinced that they’re in a life and death struggle. Three hour board meetings, frantic phone calls, endless email threads exegeting each passive-aggressive line of text.

The handwringing is exquisite in its enjoyment of self-inflicted pain, like the ever darting tongue rolling over a canker sore. Drama gives satisfaction, just to the extent that it allows its participants to feel the same apprehension and foreboding felt by people who really are facing cataclysms. Life seems so much more significant when infused with the adrenaline of anxiety.

But here’s the problem I see: Congregations addicted to drama are virtually incapable of doing the kind of reflection necessary to recognize when they’re doing something right. The lizard brain takes over, reactivity sets in, and every external stimulus gets read as a threat requiring all the energy and resources of the body.

What if you were doing something outrageously important, but because it didn’t fit whatever model of success sold to you by a cynical culture you continued to cling to the familiar fears you associated with your inadequacies?

What if caring for that group of aging CWF women was the very thing God put you on the earth to do?

What if as God is busy drawing up the blueprint, your congregation’s role in helping usher in the God’s reign is handing out backpacks and haircuts to the children of migrant field workers?

What if what you have to offer for the cause is a van and a couple of folks willing to go to the wrong side of town to pick up a few kids who’ll never swell anybody’s bottom line?

What if God is busy saving the world with the very resources you discount because you’re so addicted to the drama, so afraid your resources can’t possibly be enough that you don’t even realize it?

In The War of Art, a book about writing and the pursuit of creative passion, Steven Pressfield gets at the crux of the issue:

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

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You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Don’t let the drama suck your soul and steal your passion for the very thing God is depending on you to do.